Prime time television news in Portugal

length and news value

Abstract

Considering what the information, especially the prime time television news, represents in the generalist television channels, and the more competitive strategies of getting more audiences, several models have been adopted with implications at their structure, alignment and contents.
Taking in account that several studies that use a methodology of comparison of prime time television newspapers in several countries, and assuming the idea in which the television Portuguese newspapers are particularly long, this approach considers their length as the main subject of analysis. We intend to study the relation between the length of the television newspaper and its model, in terms of structure, alignment and contents.
In this study, we have adopted the methodological perspective developed in the international project “News definitions across cultures”, the analysis of the news was centred especially in the news value (valence, deviance and significance).
From the results, we may conclude that there are differences in terms of content and structure, depending on the length of television journals. We find no significant differences in terms of alignment.